Protecting intellectual property rights associated with media data (e.g., audio, video, video conferencing, Internet Telephony, etc.) is a paramount concern for content providers in today's highly connected Internet and World-Wide Web (WWW) environments. Some content providers may license their media data content (e.g., movies, music, etc.), such that secure distribution becomes critical to their revenue base. Other content providers do not sell their media data (e.g., video conferencing, Internet Telephony, etc.) but need to ensure that their media data remains confidential, is not maliciously intercepted, and is consumed only by intended recipients.
In many cases, a content provider's media data resides internal within an enterprise's firewall environment, such as an Intranet, but there is a need and a desire for distributing that media data to external recipients securely. In other cases, the media data is only accessible via hardwired or other dedicated secure communication lines or only accessible via dedicated Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). These solutions are expensive and restrictive to content providers because consumers of the media data need expensive and limiting environments for acquiring the media data and for ensuring proper delivery and consumption.
Moreover, media players that are conventionally available in the industry for playing or consuming media data are not equipped for handling communications using secure communications protocols, such as Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTPS) over a Secure Socket Layer (SSL), referred to as HTTPS. Thus, if content providers desire to stream their media data in a secure fashion, they are out of luck because media players designed to processing streaming media data cannot communicate with HTTPS. Furthermore, streaming is often a necessity because of the voluminous nature of typical media data. Without a streaming solution, media players would experience long initial latency before play can be initiated, and play may be continuously delayed or interrupted while waiting on more of the media data to arrive at the media player. Thus, streaming solutions have become a real necessity in the industry because of usability issues and timeliness issues.
Another technique which content providers use is deploying a Digital Rights Management (DRM) system. A DRM is maintained and manually configured by network administrators associated with the content provider. A DRM will encrypt media data based on a specific instance of that media data for consumption and delivery to users. That encrypted data is then decrypted and used by the media players of the users over insecure communication channels (e.g., existing streaming protocols, such as Real Time Protocol (RTP), Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP), and Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) over HTTP, etc.) The problem with DRM is that each instance of media data needs to be manually defined and maintained by the network administrators, which is a time-consuming and resource-expensive task. Additionally, the DRM needs to be manually installed and interfaced to the streaming service associated with the content provider. As a result, many content providers have shied away from conventional DRM systems.
Correspondingly, many content providers continue to deliver their media data using traditional and insecure communications, such as HTTP. This media data is encoded in industry standard formats, which any malicious intruder can decode simply by having a conventional media player. Alternatively, content providers continue to deliver their media data using expensive and limiting solutions, such as dedicated secure communication channels hardwired or existing as dedicated VPNs. Still other content providers have resigned themselves to the fact that a DRM system and its associated manually-intensive support is a necessity for them. The present situation is not preferred and not desired, but a reality that content providers are forced to deal with. Either a content provider limits accessibility to its media data to a select few who can afford to acquire the necessary hardware or VPN, a content provider elects to enhance its user base and knowingly exposes its media data to malicious interception and potential near instantaneous world-wide exposure or a content provider installs a manually-intensive DRM system.
Thus, there is a need for improving the techniques associated with securely delivering media data.